About Corayo: A Thematic History of Greater Geelong
In 2021, Society member Dr David Rowe published his landmark study About Corayo: A Thematic History of Geelong. Completed for the City of Greater Geelong, the work received the Judges’ Special Prize at the Victorian Community History Awards 2022, recognising its significance in documenting the region’s cultural landscape.
Rather than presenting a chronological narrative, the study explores Geelong’s past through a series of interconnected themes. This approach explains how and why the municipality looks as it does today, linking historical events with both surviving and hidden physical evidence and the cultural stories that shaped them.
The thematic history also brings forward the often‑overlooked experiences of First Nations people, women, and emigrants, including later non‑British arrivals whose contributions helped define Greater Geelong’s development.
Because of its size, About Corayo is available to freely download from the City of Greater Geelong as individual thematic sections or accessed as one file on TROVE. You can find links to these themes below.
Search the Study
In an attempt to make this groundbreaking text widely accessible the Geelong Historical Society has created two tools, with the permission of the author, that permit members and the public to undertake detailed searches across its nine themes. Both use natural, plain-English searches which return a summary with links to the specific pages within the history. Neither of them go beyond the text: if there is no reference to your search, it tells you.
Explore About Corayo using one of our two plain‑English search tools:
Our original tool offers a straightforward search and is available to just registered Society members. It is nimble and gives a concise response relatively quickly.
The second tool, also developed by the Society, provides a deeper and more flexible search experience. Each search takes about 20 seconds to generate but its response is deeper with clickable links to related topics within the history.
It is open to both members and the public, but it does require users to sign in with a Google account. If you already use Gmail, you can access it immediately; otherwise, creating a free Google account will allow full use of the tool.
The themes covered in About Corayo
Please note that these links will open a new tab in your browser, leaving our website for the COGG’s website. You can also save these files as PDF docs on your own computer.
Theme 1. Environment — Geelong’s natural landscape, flora and fauna, and how people have lived with and cared for natural processes.
Theme 2. Peopling Greater Geelong — Life on Wadawurrung Country, European arrival and colonisation, dispossession, and waves of migration from the 19th century to today.
Theme 3. Transport & Communications — Traditional routes, roads, rail, shipping, aviation, and the development of newspapers, telegraphy, and radio.
Theme 4. Land & Resources — Farming, timber, quarrying, brickmaking, mining, and the growth of water and sewerage systems.
Theme 5. Industry & Workforce — Wadawurrung knowledge, industrial growth, trade, commerce, finance, hospitality, and utilities.
Theme 6. Building the City — Geelong’s evolution from early settlement through industrial expansion to a modern regional centre.
Theme 7. Governing — Wadawurrung governance, local government development, law and order, waterways, defence, roads, and planning.
Theme 8. Community Life — Spiritual life, education, health, welfare, community organisations, and commemoration.
Theme 9. Cultural & Creative Life — Sport, recreation, and Geelong’s clever and creative identity.
You can also access the history as one file on TROVE.
Please note that full hard‑copy version is available at the Geelong Heritage Centre, and the COGG provides this free access to download PDF documents of the whole history. The society has used these histories with the permission of the author, Dr David Rowe.
Photo Credit: The banner image is sourced from the Society’s Costa Collection and shows a view looking west along Ryrie Street, where it crosses Moorabool Street.
